Heath Hallman
SLM:521
Responding to Copyright Issues

Situation #1 - A teacher in your school (who has a really rowdy bunch of monsters) makes an agreement with them that they learn how to make power point presentations on sports, war, hunting, rock music and such. She lets them get graphics from anywhere on the Internet. Sites such as Sports Illustrated, ESPN. DOD, Rock Music Hall of Fame. They make great presentations and become great kids. What are the copyright implications??

Response - According section 2 of the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia published by the Consortium of College and University Media Centers,  "Students may incorporate portions of lawfully acquired copyrighted works when producing their own educational multimedia projects for a specific course." Furthermore, according to section 3, students may "use them in their own portfolios as examples of their academic work for later personal uses such as job and graduate school interviews." When it applies to education, and there is no question of profit making on the part of the borrower, the guidelines for Fair Use tend to be pretty lax. I don't think there is any problem with the above situation, but to be sure, I would have the kids incorporate some statement that gives credit to the sites where the graphics were obtained.


Situation #2 - Mr. Jamweimer, the parent of one of our most intellectual students, has paid to download a wonderful computer software program for his little Einstein. Mr. Jamweimer wants "our school" to be the best and sends a copy of the download file to be used by the students on the computers at school. P.S. all of the kids use it and win Nobel prizes in science, literature, physics, chemistry, and playground.

Response - You'll notice none of the students went on to law school, however, because this was definitely copyright infringement. This is actually called "end user" piracy and it is one of the types of software piracy that is very common. in this case the piracy occurs when Mr. Jamweimer takes his one licensed copy and installs the program on multiple computers. In cases like this, educators do not have a special priveledge like in some other instances. Another type of piracy that occurs too frequently is called client-server overuse. This is when too many employees on a network are using a central copy of a program at the same time. The important thing to keep in mind is license; or, is it legal for me to use or let others use this software.